Before I disappeared for what amounted to nearly a month I had been working on a second short paper assignment for English 325, five pages on any poem we had covered in class. I had selected William Butler Yeats' "The Second Coming". We had three options for how to approach this paper and I chose what even the teacher considered the most difficult (because it worked with what I wanted to do). It involved describing a poem and explaining how it works and it is a format encountered in the MFA program at GMU. I just got the paper back today and I was very pleased to see I had earned an A. My professor's comments on the back of my final draft were as follows: "Nicely done. The question/answer structure of the paper works well to showcase the interpretation decisions you make, and how you make them. Your attention to the language of the poem pays off in nuanced, smart readings. If you're interested, you might want to read more Yeats- he's certainly a poet worth exploring in more depth."
My experiences with the poem "The Second Coming" all started with my reading of the title. It evoked a certain Christian reference. Specifically, I associated the phrase with Christ. Based upon the title, my expectations were that this poem would be about a major anticipated event in Christian history: the Second Coming of Christ. To determine whether or not my early assumption was correct, I had to shift my attention to the actual content of the poem.
Upon first glance and taken as a whole, the poem didn't appear to have any formal divisions. Because I am accustomed to and comfortable with dealing with four line stanzas I imposed that structure on the poem. When I began to read the first four lines I made a startling discovery that something was wrong: the bird cannot hear its master. To see if and how this would fit in with my initial expectations, I considered that the falcon might represent Christians and the falconer could potentially work as a metaphor for God. I needed more detail to be sure so I pushed on. The words "Mere anarchy" were an unusual combination that made me pause for a moment on the fourth line. I wondered how something as disruptive as anarchy could ever be considered "mere." When I accepted that anarchy is just one small thing in the context of this poem, I was led to ask myself what the big thing might be.
Keeping my question in mind, I focused on the next four lines. "The blood-dimmed tide" conjured strong imagery. I pictured a multitude of bleeding bodies floating in the ocean. The word "ceremony," found on the sixth line, struck me as being rather peculiar. The word itself represents some sort of formal action performed according to ritual or perhaps tradition, but then what is meant by the phrase "The ceremony of innocence" taken all together? The line could refer to ritualized naivety. Innocence can also be defined as freedom from sin and that seems to fit in with the emerging Christian theme. According to the last fragment of the line, it is submerged in the "blood-dimmed tide." This all stemmed from "Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world," which is a poetic way of saying all hell is breaking loose. According to what I envisioned, anarchy still did not seem very "mere" at all, but I still didn't have anything to compare it to. For that, I looked to the seventh line, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst." This just generated even more questions. Who are the best and who are the worst? Still keeping with the original Christian motif, the best could refer to those without sin, or more specifically the innocents referred to before in the sixth line. Logically, that would mean that the worst are those with sin who lack the naivety of the innocents. What about the worst? The eighth line completed the speaker's thought about the worst, which had broken off abruptly in the middle of the seventh, "Are full of passionate intensity". Why is being full of passionate intensity a bad thing? It sounds like the worst have strong beliefs. That conceivably could be a bad thing if the best are not asserting their beliefs or if they just don't have any. I reread the seventh and the eighth lines of the poem and realized that I had completely glazed over what was important about the best because I was so fixated on what effect the worst had on everything. According to the seventh, "The best lack all conviction." That seemed to confirm that I was on the right track.
I considered the first of the following four lines, "Surely some revelation is at hand." The word revelation gave me pause. The first connection that I made was that "Revelation" is also the title of the last book found in the sacred Christian text, the Bible. That not only fit in with everything else I had seen thus far, but it also seemed to provide me with a clue as to what this poem is really about. This particular book of the Bible postulates what is to come immediately prior to the omega of Christianity, which presumably will be marked by Christ's second descent to earth so he can harvest all of the good Christian souls and return with them to Heaven. I thought about the literal meaning of the word "revelation." It refers to something not previously recognized that is revealed, usually in a dramatic way. I wondered briefly about what I was not seeing that this poem would soon impart. There was only one way to find out and that was to keep working through it. The tenth line declared "Surely the Second Coming is at hand." What will the second coming reveal? The language seemed to speed up with the next line, "The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out." I made a metal note that that the words had a sense of urgency to them. Again the speaker's thought was cropped off at the middle and I hurried on to the following line to uncover what happened next. The speaker began to imagine something in the twelfth line.
I looked to the next four lines to see if could find out more information about what the speaker imagined. I first found contained in the thirteenth line a clue as to who the speaker of the poem might be. Yeats selected the word "my" and that, in the absence of any other evidence, led me to believe that the author is referring to himself. The speaker proceeded to describe his vision as "a shape with a lion body and the head of a man" on the fourteenth line. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine what that might look like. What I pictured was a sphinx, a creature commonly encountered in Egyptian mythology. This seemed like it might be a significant parallel for me to draw, but I really had no idea as to why. If that wasn't the intent, why didn't the speaker describe it as having the body of a man and the head of a lion? That would certainly resemble something I have never before seen. I returned to my mental image to consider why the speaker might have envisioned the body of a lion and the head of a man. I thought about what it might mean symbolically: the body of a lion seemed to represent a great animal strength, and the head of the man seemed representative of the human faculty of reason. On the fifteenth line I learned that this creature had "A gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun." It occurred to me that while this creature possessed attributes resembling those of a human, it might lack the compassion generally associated with mankind and its capacity for higher reasoning. That was frightening to imagine. From what I read in the sixteenth line, I understood that this beast is by no means dormant; it "Is moving its slow thighs." I pictured it slowly making its way through the desert and wondered where it was destined.
To find out where the creature was headed, I considered the next four lines. I had to take a mental step back to reread the last part of the sixteenth line "while all about it," and I proceeded on to the seventeenth "Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds." Usually vultures inhabit the desert and they feed on carrion. The birds are circling over the beast and so I was led to believe that it would cause death. This confirmed in my mind that the beast lacked human compassion. However, I still needed to find the answer I was seeking. Presented in the eighteenth line "The darkness drops again; but now I know" was another instance where the author referred to himself, this time as "I." The speaker of the poem still seemed to be none other than Yeats himself. I reread the line again focusing on the first part. I considered when it was dark before because the poem specifically used the word "again." According to Genesis, the first book of the Bible, it was dark in the beginning. If Creation or perhaps just Christianity ceased to exist would it get dark a second time? Another image suggested to me here is that of an eclipse or a sunset. New questions formed in my mind. The speaker made the claim that he now "knows," but what did he learn? Did he intend to reveal it to me? I read the next line, "That twenty centuries of stony sleep." That made me think about what was significant that happened two thousand years ago. I realized that that was around the time when Christ lived and died. Line twenty reads, "Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle." The obvious question I was left with was: what has been asleep?
There was no clearer answer to that question lurking in the remaining two lines. Instead, they posed a similar question to my own: "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?" Bethlehem is the place where Jesus was born. I realized just then that the revelation had already taken place. The author had revealed to me that he had this idea that whatever the second coming would bring would not be the same as Christ. He did not have a precise view of it, and consequently neither should I.
My first encounter with the title of this poem, "The Second Coming," set up my expectation that this piece would concern the second coming of Christ. The poem is about a second coming, but I found that it doesn't necessarily refer to Christ. This piece works because of the expectation I had early on. The title itself is an allusion designed to elicit that expectation. The author's careful word selection also affected my reading of this poem. For example, he juxtaposed the words "mere" and "anarchy" on the fourth line of the poem. It seemed unusual to me at first, but once I accepted that idea, any other word I could think to substitute "mere" with just wouldn't have prepared me in the same way for something worse than anarchy. Another mechanism the author used to make this poem work was imagery. On line fourteen he described the beast as "A shape with lion body and the head of a man." I was forced to consider what the body of a lion and the head of a man were meant to represent. The second line of the poem, "The falcon cannot hear the falconer," seemed to be a metaphor for something else. I thought about it and I decided that the falcon represented Christians and the falconer suggested God.
At first glance and taken as a whole this poem did not have an obvious structure. It became much clearer to me as I read the content. It made sense when I thought of first ten lines as all communicating the events that will lead up to the second coming. The next ten described what the speaker thought the second coming will be like. All twenty led up to a question posed in the final two lines: what is coming? I have a vague understanding of the answer to that question. Perhaps the more important question is whether or not I will recognize it when it comes.
-- CrystalShiloh @ 05:19 PM